HOLY GAMING SMOKE!

Meet the Ryzen 7 5800X3D, AMD’s latest and very possibly the last CPU of the 5000-series, which they claim to be the “fastest” and most “advanced” gaming processor.

- Aaron Yip

A GLANCE

PROCESS - TSMC 7nm FinFET

BASE/BOOST CLOCK - 3.4GHz / 4.5GHz

CORES/THREADS - 8 / 16

L2/L3 - 4MB / 96 MB

TDP - 105W

Now, the 5800X3D is based on the existing Ryzen 75800X and so comes with the same core and thread count, similar default TDP and still supports up to PCIe 4.0.

The 5800X3D has markedly lower clock and boost clock speeds, but comes with an astounding 96MB L3 cache. That’s triple of the 5800X and a third more than the flagship Ryzen 9 5900X processor. What’s going on? The answer is AMD’s latest technology, called 3D V-Cache.

To put it simply, 3D V-Cache is an AMD technology that enables it to vertically stack cache onto a CPU. This allows AMD to increase the processor’s memory, without having to increase the size of the die or shrink its logic circuits, and thus allowing it to triple the L3 cache of its processors.

AMD claims the processor’s superior L3 cache size will result in a 15 per cent gaming performance improvement over the Ryzen 9 5900X. That’s almost an entire architectural generation worth of performance improvement, if you think about it. But therein lies the catch. The 5800X3D is geared as a gaming processor, and AMD says there is no uplift in content creation.